Privatize, privatize, privatize.

It’s the cry of administrators everywhere, from parks to schools to prisons. For many, it’s part of a philosophical attack on big government; for others, it’s purely a way to save on expenses.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Conditions at the Department of Defense Walter Reed Hospital have dominated news reports in recent days. As more information is unearthed, the word “privatize” is mentioned with an increasing frequency.

An article in the Army Times newspaper discusses how “the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel.’ The push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002.”

The Morenci Board of Education made a privatization move Monday night that we don’t expect to adversely affect the school. Substitute teachers will no longer be hired by the school district and therefore will no longer receive retirement benefits.

It’s clearly a bad deal for subs, but unpleasant and personally costly changes are becoming common in many Michigan school districts. A lot of changes have been decided; many remain to be made.

As school board members continue their quest to scale back expenses, we urge them to think carefully about privatization moves. Here at the newspaper office, we see papers from throughout the area and we’ve read many accounts of outsourcing transportation, maintenance and food services.

Followup stories a year down the road sometimes show results that aren’t always what administrators had hoped for. A private maintenance firm will be hired, then discarded for another, or in one case we saw, employees were again hired by the board after frustration with the private firm.

Let the Walter Reed Hospital mess stay fresh in board members’ minds and remind them to very carefully go about the process of privatization.